The fourth of four ideas 'seen' in the new iPhone announcements, as reported by Kyle Vanhemert at Wired:
Body and Context Aware
The iPhone 5S’ fingerprint sensor isn’t the only way the device more closely links itself to our meaty selves. In addition to the new A7 processor, Apple announced something called the M7–a “motion coprocessor” that taps into the phone’s accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass to give the device a better picture of what you’re actually doing from moment to moment. Instead of just knowing “moving” or “not moving,” developers will be able to tell if you’re standing, walking, running, or driving. Accessing this type of sensor data isn’t anything new, but with the M7, the iPhone 5S is going to be collecting it continuously, figuring out what it means, and serving it up for apps to integrate as they will–all without draining the battery.
On a basic level, those situational smarts will allow for more context-aware behavior throughout our devices. The new iPhone, for instance, will sense when you’re driving and won’t try to connect you to every Wi-Fi network you speed past. That’s just one annoyance smoothed out, but the M7 could let Apple fine-tune the iOS 7 user experience to an unprecedented degree.
The iPhone 5S will pass along that capability to third party apps, too. As Phil Schiller explained on stage, a new CoreMotion API will include some sort of standardized analysis of all your movements and what they mean in real world terms. So it won’t be up to the Nike app to figure out if you’re running, walking or biking–the app will be able to rely on Apple for that analysis and design around it accordingly.
That again might seem like a small thing, but looking forward to the future of wearable, context-aware devices, it’s an important foundation to establish. Companies like Nike and Jawbone hire people solely to do this type of analysis, figuring out algorithms that let their devices understand how, specifically, their users are being active. By standardizing it all, Apple’s paving the way for apps that have a more agreed-upon understanding of what’s going on around you, or with you, and opening up the potential for more nuanced and sophisticated responses to it. If your iPhone senses that you’re swiveling slightly side to side between the hours of 9 and 5, say, it could be able to tell that you’re probably at work, at your computer–maybe a situation where it makes more sense to route iMessages to your main screen.
It will be up to developers to come up with ways to make use of this sort of data–experiences beyond just more sophisticated fitness apps. But the M7 and new CoreMotion API are indeed forward looking. They’re the first small step toward a much richer body computing platform. And plus, peering ahead a product cycle or three, the M7 shows shows Apple dabbling in components that can continuously monitor sophisticated sensors on a tight battery budget. The type of budget you’d have to work with for something like an iWatch.
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So here we are, living in a two iPhone world. Both the iPhone 5S and the 5C are just what we expected, but they hide within their designs some key insights to Apple’s future. The iPhone 5C is the iPhone for today, where growing segments of people might not care about the iPhone’s cachet or its processing power so much as the ability to own a new, different, funky, and thoroughly personalized gadget. The iPhone 5S is the iPhone for tomorrow, where, thanks to sophisticated sensors and smarter software, we won’t need to take our phones out of our pockets nearly as often in the first place.
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